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Good user experience makes for smoother deployments

3rd Mar 2015

The ideal research and development (R&D) data management solution can be deployed across different teams, geographies and even be used with external stakeholders. But often the cost of deployment and training is daunting.

You may not realize just how important good user experience (UX) design is to giving you back peace of mind.

R&D is a complex business, generating large amounts of data. As the sector has grown and changed, R&D enterprise software has evolved to keep pace with scientific advances and new research techniques. Software has become ever more powerful and versatile but there is a downside. Piecemeal evolution can easily lead to ‘feature overload’ and unwieldy user interfaces (UIs).

Now a complex UI may not be as big a problem for an establish team of researchers who’ve ‘grown up’ with a given piece of software and learned to manage new features as they’ve become available. But for new deployments and today’s collaborative ways of approaching R&D, this type of software with its complex UI and confusing UX can present serious challenges. New and more casual users are baffled, leading to sky-rocketing training and deployment costs.

That’s why we believe that good UX design can save the day. If we put ourselves in the shoes of a new user, as R&D enterprise software developers, we can design a UI around their needs; highlighting the most common commands and transactions they carry out – the so called ‘happy path’.

When UX works with the user instead of against them, then organizations are able to deploy software easier and control training overheads, channeling precious resources to other areas.

That was certainly the thinking behind our recent launch of E-WorkBook 10. Our Head of User Experience, Dr Jonathan Davies has put together this short eBook to give you a look behind the scenes of the UX considerations that inspired the E-WorkBook 10 journey. You can also find out more on the subject in this article and by watching our recent webinar.